A project to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design. uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration.

in July 2014, [Sony’s] repairs [of Aibo robot dogs] stopped and owners were left to look elsewhere for help. The Sony stiff has led not only to the formation of support groups–where Aibo enthusiasts can share tips and help each other with repairs–but has fed the bionic pet vet industry. “The people who have them feel their presence and personality,” Nobuyuki Narimatsu, director of A-Fun, a repair company for robot dogs, told AFP. “So we think that somehow, they really have souls.” While concerted repair efforts have kept many an Aibo alive, a shortage of spare parts means that some of their lives have come to an end.

‘We propose a new data structure called the cuckoo filter that can replace Bloom filters for approximate set membership tests. Cuckoo filters support adding and removing items dynamically while achieving even higher performance than Bloom filters. For applications that store many items and target moderately low false positive rates, cuckoo filters have lower space overhead than space-optimized Bloom filters. Our experimental results also show that cuckoo filters outperform previous data structures that extend Bloom filters to support deletions substantially in both time and space.’

“The sisters make a pretty picture on the platform ; but it is not women of their type who need to assert themselves over Man. However, it amuses them–and others ; and I doubt if the tyrant has much to fear from their little arrows.” Constance Markievicz was one of those sisters, and the other was Eva Gore-Booth.

Authy doesn’t come off well here: ‘Authy should have been harder to break. It’s an app, like Authenticator, and it never left Davis’ phone. But Eve simply reset the app on her phone using a mail.com address and a new confirmation code, again sent by a voice call. A few minutes after 3AM, the Authy account moved under Eve’s control.’

How meaningful is this corporate data science, anyway? Given the tech-savvy people in the Bay Area, Jawbone likely had a very dense sample of Jawbone wearers to draw from for its Napa earthquake analysis. That allowed it to look at proximity to the epicenter of the earthquake from location information. Jawbone boasts its sample population of roughly “1 million Up wearers who track their sleep using Up by Jawbone.” But when looking into patterns county by county in the U.S., Jawbone states, it takes certain statistical liberties to show granularity while accounting for places where there may not be many Jawbone users. So while Jawbone data can show us interesting things about sleep patterns across a very large population, we have to remember how selective that population is. Jawbone wearers are people who can afford a $129 wearable fitness gadget and the smartphone or computer to interact with the output from the device. Jawbone is sharing what it learns with the public, but think of all the public health interests or other third parties that might be interested in other research questions from a large scale data set. Yet this data is not collected with scientific processes and controls and is not treated with the rigor and scrutiny that a scientific study requires. Jawbone and other fitness trackers don’t give us the option to use their devices while opting out of contributing to the anonymous data sets they publish. Maybe that ought to change.

The Large Hadron Migrator is a tool to perform live database migrations in a Rails app without locking.

The basic idea is to perform the migration online while the system is live, without locking the table. In contrast to OAK and the facebook tool, we only use a copy table and triggers. The Large Hadron is a test driven Ruby solution which can easily be dropped into an ActiveRecord or DataMapper migration. It presumes a single auto incremented numerical primary key called id as per the Rails convention. Unlike the twitter solution, it does not require the presence of an indexed updated_at column.

This is pretty nuts. If biased locking in the HotSpot JVM is causing performance issues, it can be turned off:

You can avoid biased locking on a per-object basis by calling System.identityHashCode(o). If the object is already biased, assigning an identity hashCode will result in revocation, otherwise, the assignment of a hashCode() will make the object ineligible for subsequent biased locking.